Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music Now, and I have right here in the studio with me, Mr Billy Idol.

Hello.

Hi, Brian, hi everybody. Thanks so much for being here. This. Hello. Hi, everybody.

Thanks so much for being here.

This is exciting.

Oh, fantastic.

So I think you wrote one of the best rock autobiography is Dancing with Myself.

It's a great book.

I learned a lot about you from it. A lot of stuff I knew already, but in some ways I think people don't know certain things about you. And I want to ask a few things just about tracing the whole story here. I mean, one thing that strikes me is so amazing is that you quit

college you quit university to go off and be a punk rocker a thing that

barely existed.

You had to tell your dad that you were quitting

to start a punk rock band when that wasn't even really a thing.

What I'm curious about is, where did you have the faith

that that would be anything but sort of be ultimately like being a derelict?

Where did you have the faith that that could be something when the pistols barely existed?

None of this stuff was even happening yet.

Well in 76 I got this postcard so he from Steve Bailey was in it was in the ban sheet later on he was in the banches and he'd seen the sex pistols and he sent me this postcard saying you, we've seen the band we've been waiting for,

get back up here to London, because I was down in Sussex University of Brighton,

it's only an hour away from London, but in England that's, I don't know, that's a long way away from London you know.

But anyway yeah they'd seen the pistols really and then I came up to London and I saw a number of

gigs and I watched the pistols go from you know doing covers basically but they're doing

...